Review: Ping Pong brings it to the table

Film Review: Ping Pong (3.5 stars)

3.5 stars

If you like sports documentaries but find the athletes too young, Ping Pong is your game. This British film follows the ups and downs of the most senior table-tennis champions on the planet.

We spend almost half an hour meeting eight hopefuls who are preparing for the world championships in China. Their average age is 88, although that statistic is skewed by Dorothy deLow, a 100-year-old Australian. Terry Donlon from England, who’s fighting cancer even as he fights for a medal, is just 81.

They’re a feisty, never-say-die bunch of scrappers, masters of the forehand smash and the backhanded compliment. Rune Forsberg from Stockholm asks the camera how often Donlon and fellow Brit Les D’Arcy practice. When he hears three times a week, he thinks for a moment and says he probably averages three and a half. More than once we hear someone remark that an opponent “can’t move.”

Ursula Bihl, 89 and the reigning world champion in her age group, says she’d be happy to die at the table, just not any time soon. She speaks German, although her comment “Bihl über alles” needs no translation.

The 80-minute doc follows a fairly traditional arc. The eight players are pictured in front of their national flags, and get removed from the mosaic as they drop out through the qualifying rounds.

There are some great moments of table tension. When Bihl squares off against the Viennese-born American Lisa Modlich, this battle of the iron-hairs cried out for some Wagner on the soundtrack. And of course the presence of other competitors leaves open the possibility that none of the athletes we’re following will make it.

Ping Pong was directed by Hugh Hartford, who treats his subjects with due respect. Although it would be hard to mock D’Arcy, a seven-time world champion who lifts weights, recites poetry and has been playing ping pong for 77 years, with time off to liberate Europe in 1944. He just turned 91.

Even the less storied participants get their time in the spotlight. Sun Yong Qing, an 80-year-old chain-smoker from Mongolia, says that even losing is an honour. Modlich’s philosophy: “It’s not how hard you play; it’s where you put it.” She’s referring to table tennis; at least, I hope so.